Deeplinks Blog posts about WIPO

WIPO's proposed Broadcasting Treaty lurched forward another step on Wednesday. In a tense and acrimonious meeting, the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights adopted a recommendation that WIPO's General Assembly should convene a 2007 Diplomatic Conference to finalize the treaty. The 183 WIPO Member States must now decide whether to accept that and convene the Conference, when the General Assembly meets on September 25 - October 3. It's not at all clear whether they will do so, but EFF will be at WIPO to report on events as they unfold.

The WIPO Broadcasting Treaty has just passed the next step on its way to a Diplomatic Conference in 2007. The meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights has just recommended that the WIPO General Assembly convene a Diplomatic Conference in July 2007.

Overruling the objections of a number of WIPO Member States (including the United States), the following recommendations were grudgingly adopted under a silent procedure:

The WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is meeting this week in Geneva to discuss and "finalize" the proposed Broadcasting Treaty. WIPO's goal is to get the 182 Member States to make a recommendation to the upcoming General Assembly that it should convene an early 2007 Diplomatic Conference, where the nuts and bolts of the treaty would be hammered out. Stakes are high. This will be the third time that the treaty has been put forward for a vote on holding a Diplomatic Conference. At the end of day 2, it looks like they might get their wish. The only question is at what cost?

Negotiations on the WIPO Development Agenda came to a grinding halt today, after the Chair presented the Committee with a proposed recommendation for the WIPO General Assembly that raised concerns about procedural fairness and transparency. Brazil and Argentina announced that they had instructions from their governments to withdraw from the process due to unfair procedural treatment, and requested that the existing proposals be sent to the WIPO General Assembly to decide the future of the Development Agenda. The only thing that was clear by day's end is that the annual General Assembly meeting on September 25-October 3 will be very interesting indeed.

Read on for more analysis and the NGO Coalition's notes after the jump.

For most of day 2 of this week's meeting on the WIPO Development Agenda, we counted. We heard statements from Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and South Africa about the importance of protecting the public domain, balancing intellectual property rights with human rights, and the very real problems facing developing countries . In between, we listened to developed countries reel off lists of the numbers of the 111 proposals that they would -- and in the case of the U.S., Japan and Mexico -- would not support.

There was no real engagement or debate on matters of substance; the developed countries have clearly decided that the real action will be at the September WIPO General Assembly. Meanwhile, Brazil on behalf of the Group of Friends of Development, continued carefully documenting how their 21 proposal document (PCDA/2/2) addresses and summarizes the proposals on the table.